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There’s a lot of smoke billowing above Abdul El-Sayed’s head — yet some CBS News staffers are furious their boss wants them to check for fire.
This week’s dust-up over Michigan Democrats’ US Senate candidate is emblematic of the network’s last year of melodrama, as Editor-in-Chief Bari Weiss keeps urging her colleagues to do journalism and they, in turn, keep running to their peers to cry about it.
The malcontents channeled their latest outburst through Semafor’s Max Tani, who on Sunday submitted a scornful dispatch complaining that Weiss “has personally advocated for CBS News journalists to pursue numerous story angles related to El-Sayed’s supposed sympathy towards the Muslim Brotherhood.”
Control of the Senate, he charged, “could come down to how much the news media chooses to focus . . . on a tweet sent years ago by the younger half-sister” of El-Sayed.
Tani transcribed one staffer’s catty comment that Weiss “seems more suited to editing at publications like City Journal, The Free Press or The [Washington] Free Beacon.”
But the anonymous coward’s cheap shot and Tani’s dutiful parroting of their gripes are actually indictments of their own journalistic habits and judgment.
To say that the proof of El-Sayed’s ties to the notorious Islamist group consists of just one tweet from his half-sister is either to willfully mislead one’s audience or to betray one’s own ignorance.
Either way, it’s malpractice.
In 2012, El-Sayed himself signed a letter urging Mohamed Morsi, the Muslim Brotherhood-backed president of Egypt at the time, to use new authorities he had bestowed upon himself to punish his political foes.
Pro-democracy activists in the country described Morsi’s power grab as “absolute presidential tyranny,” “a horrifying coup,” “a complete assassination of the democratic transition” and “autocratic.”
But where others saw an appalling crackdown on dissent, El-Sayed saw opportunity.
“We, leaders of the Egyptian community, support the revolutionary decisions taken by the president, and we call on him to purge the media and the police as quickly as possible,” read the letter.
It wasn’t the first time El-Sayed had leapt to the defense of the terror group, which he’d previously presented as a reform movement and insisted would not give way to a strongman.
Ironic, given that he was so eager to break out the pom-poms once his naïve prediction proved embarrassingly off-base.
Just days ago El-Sayed denied that he or anyone in his family is connected to the Brotherhood during an interview with NBC’s Kristen Welker (uh-oh, did Weiss get to her, too?), complaining that it was “even a subject of debate.”
His denial was a lie.
As Welker’s colleague Tom Llamas pointed out to the candidate in a subsequent interview, El-Sayed’s half-sister didn’t merely fire off “a tweet” suggesting their family had ties to the organization, as Tani erroneously posited; she practically wrote a book about it.
Her long trail of posts about their mom’s “activism in the Muslim Brotherhood,” her “family that supports the #MB in #Egpt,” and the fact that her family has “long been MB” is a little more substantial than Tani let on, no?
As if that weren’t damning enough, El-Sayed’s father-in-law was a member of the founding committee of the Islamic Society of North America — a group that was named an unindicted co-conspirator in the infamous Holy Land Foundation terror-financing case, and was identified as a US branch of the Muslim Brotherhood by federal prosecutors.
Every accusation against Weiss by her underlings is an admission of their own sins.
The reports on El-Sayed’s father-in-law and his pro-Morsi letter were both the work of the Free Beacon, one of the outlets that Weiss’ disgruntled employee disdained so snidely.
Two stories very much in the public interest — unless your conception of the public interest is “electing Democrats.”
The modus operandi at CBS and its fellows across the mainstream-media landscape has long been to dig deep for dirt on anyone with an “R” next to their name, while running interference for anyone with an adjacent “D.”
It’s a phenomenon exemplified by Tani’s own whitewashing of El-Sayed’s sordid history of support for the Brotherhood, and his prosecution of the less-than-convincing case against Weiss.
And by the teeth-gnashing over CBS legal correspondent Jan Crawford’s tweet in praise of a voter who asked El-Sayed if he would disavow the Brotherhood at a recent town hall event.
Quelle horreur, right?
The hyperpartisan brats trying to bring their boss down have gotten so used to acting as de facto Democratic operatives, they’ve actually convinced themselves that doing so is journalism — and that giving equal scrutiny to candidates of both parties is hackery.
Margaret Thatcher was fond of the Charles Mackay poem “No Enemies,” a bracing defense of those who take bold moral action.
“He who has mingled in the fray of duty, that the brave endure, must have made foes!” Mackay declared.
Bari Weiss has made plenty of foes in her crusade for journalistic truth — and she ought to be enormously proud of every one of them.